Parents, teachers and students to commemorate MLK Holiday with March to Save Marquette School
CTU President Karen GJ Lewis says “education justice is the civil rights issue of our day”CHICAGO- Hundreds of parents, teachers, students and community residents are expected to participate in a march for education justice on Jan. 16th in honor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Holiday. Demonstrators, including Chicago Teachers Union President Karen GJ Lewis, will assemble at 10:30 a.m. at Marquette Elementary School, 6550 S. Richmond Street. Marquette Elementary is targeted by the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) for its controversial “turnaround” model.
“Education justice is the civil rights issue of our day,” said Lewis. “I am pleased to join these parents, teachers and their students in the fight to save Marquette school from takeover by the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL). This unproven turnaround model is disruptive not only to the staff but also the children who are kept in under-resourced schools. Imagine the leaps in student academic performance and the increased retention of qualified teachers if CPS invested in the transformation of schools rather than destroying them. Fifteen years of failed experiments by CPS have had a devastating impact on our students and neighborhoods.”
For the past several weeks Marquette parents and educators have led the charge to protect their school from takeover by AUSL. Nearly $25 million will be directed to elementary schools targeted for turnaround managed by the program. The teachers union has questioned potential conflicts of interests given the current Board president, David Vitale, and CPS’s chief administrative officer, Tim Cawley, are closely affiliated with the group.
Recently Cawley came under fire for admitting CPS deliberately starves struggling schools for up to a decade before the District recommends drastic measures. Saying the District believed in getting “more bang for (its)… buck,” Cawley said, “If we think there’s a chance that a building is going to be closed in the next five to 10 years… we’re not going to invest in that building.” Parents across the city universally denounced his remarks as appalling.
The CTU maintains that all students deserve access to quality schools that include smaller class sizes; a robust, comprehensive curriculum, in-school services that address their social, emotional, intellectual and health needs; and professional teachers who are treated as such, in fully resourced school buildings that welcome both parents and community.
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The Chicago Teachers Union represents 30,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in the Chicago Public Schools and, by extension, the students and families they serve. CTU, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers, is the third largest teachers local in the country and the largest local union in Illinois. For more information visit CTU’s website at www.ctunet.com.
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